Unison is a MIT-licensed programming language, in development since 2013, that explores the ramifications of making code immutable and stored in a database, instead of a set of text files. Unison supports a greatly simplified model for distributed programming — one that describes the configuration of and communication between programs in the same language as the programs themselves. Along the way, it introduces a new approach to interfacing with programming languages, which is tailored to its design.

Version 4.8.0 of the darktable photo editor has been released. Changes include performance improvements for large collections, addition of more EXIF fields in the image information module, and two new modules for image composition: Enlarge Canvas and Overlay. Enlarge Canvas allows adding areas to an image, while Overlay allows adding new content by overlaying pixels from the current image or another image. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022. Users are "strongly advised" to make a backup of their configuration and library before upgrading, as they will not be compatible with darktable 4.6.

Dan Walsh, Stef Walter, and Colin Walters all walk into a presentation and Walter asks, "why would you want to boot your containers?" This isn't the setup for some technology joke, this is part of the trio's keynote at DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic on June 14 about bootable containers (bootc). The talk, which was streamed to YouTube for those of us who didn't attend DevConf.cz in person, provided a solid overview of bootc and the problems it is intended to solve. The idea behind bootc is to make creating operating-system images just as easy as creating application-container images while using the same tools.

It is not yet clear how many of these models will fit the EU's definition of open source. Under the act, this would refer to models that are released under a "free and open" licence that, for example, allows users to modify a model but says nothing about access to training data. Refining this definition will probably form "a single pressure point that will be targeted by corporate lobbies and big companies", the paper says.

In a particular situation, when each scheduling policy needs its specific action, the core kernel scheduler calls an operation defined in struct sched_class. For example, when the core kernel scheduler needs to select a task to be scheduled, it calls the sched_class.pick_next_task(rq) callback of a concrete scheduling policy. When a task becomes runnable, the core kernel scheduler calls sched_class.enqueue(rq, p, flags) so the concrete scheduling policy enqueues task p to run queue rq. When a task's runtime state needs to be updated, the core kernel scheduler calls sched_class.update_curr(rq).

GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD and the MATE Desktop Environment. The goal of the project is to lower the barrier to entry of using FreeBSD on a desktop or laptop system, and it largely succeeds at this. While it has a few rough edges that make it hard to recommend for the average desktop user, it is a fine choice for users who want a desktop with FreeBSD underpinnings such as the Z File System (ZFS), and the Ports (source) and Packages (binary) software collections.

The 6.9.6, 6.6.35, 6.1.95, and 5.10.220 stable kernels have all been released; as usual, users are advised to update immediately.

Regular readers of our release posts will know that for the past two years we've been gradually increasing our capacity to not only maintain, but bring tangible improvements to Tor Browser for Android. In that respect, Tor Browser 13.5 feels like a milestone: in addition to the dozens of bug fixes and minor improvements noted in the changelog below, this release features major changes to Android's connection experience in preparation for the future addition of Connection Assist, including full access to Settings before connecting and a new, permanent home for Tor logs.

The release also features desktop user-interface improvements and enhanced fingerprinting protection.

Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo spoke at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit about his work on Poke-a-hole (pahole), a program that has expanded greatly over the years, but which was relevant to the BPF track because it produces BPF Type Format (BTF) information from DWARF debugging information. He covered some small changes to the program, and then went into detail about the new support for data-type profiling. His slides include several examples.